Hilde Behrend (13 August 1917 – 11 January 2000) was an economist known for her research into industrial relations and the motivational differences between workers.
Her father, Felix Wilhelm Behrend, was a physics and mathematics teacher and well-known educationalist, who was demoted and dismissed by the Nazis due to his Jewish heritage.
[2] After finishing her degree, she taught German and French at a grammar school, before starting work as a research assistant for Professor Sargant Florence at the University of Birmingham.
Behrend's research focused primarily on labour and industrial relations, in particular the interrelationships between economics and psychology in understanding how people operate at work.
[4] She coined the phrase 'effort bargaining', in relation to her research into the ways in which workers relate their effort to the pay they receive, observing that workers will work at less than their highest capacity in order to match their level of effort to what they perceive to be a fair amount of work for their pay.